Esterhazy's letters seeking a General Staff appointment

Esterhazy's letters seeking a General Staff appointment were two letters Georges Picquart presented to Boisdeffre during a briefing on his investigation. They mattered both as evidence of Esterhazy's bid for access to military secrets and as handwriting samples that Picquart connected to the bordereau.

Description and Provenance

Picquart included the letters among the documents he removed from his briefcase for the meeting: alongside the petit bleu, a photograph of the bordereau, surveillance photographs of Esterhazy outside the German Embassy, the secret dossier on Alfred Dreyfus, and Picquart's four-page investigative report. He told Boisdeffre that General Billot had instructed his staff to give him the letters. Picquart had received them the previous Thursday.

Their Significance to the Investigation

Picquart presented the letters as evidence of a change in the scale of Esterhazy's ambitions. Esterhazy, he explained, had no access to important classified material, and the information he offered was so trivial that the Germans wanted to end their connection with him. By seeking a position in the ministry, however, Esterhazy was trying to become a more valuable agent, with ready access to secrets. The letters therefore bore on a prospective danger as well as on the existing espionage investigation.

Handwriting and Consequences

Picquart noticed a striking similarity between the writing in the two letters and the bordereau. Acknowledging that he was not a handwriting expert, he took the letters to Bertillon the following day. Bertillon confirmed that the writing was identical. That finding led Picquart to review the other evidence against Alfred Dreyfus, including the secret file shown to the judges at the court martial. In the briefing, the letters thus served as a bridge from evidence implicating Esterhazy to renewed scrutiny of the case against Dreyfus.